Tobias Great Wide Open Mic

08/25/2026

I remember walking past them on a freezing December day in 1977. It was like seeing two Sears Towers. The latter was completed a year later and slightly surpassed the heights of the WTC Twin Towers. It’s shocking to realize that the Twin Towers lasted just over 28 years before Moslem terrorists destroyed them. And it’s now been almost 25 years since that part of the Islamic invasion of NYC. Tragically they’ve made remarkable inroads since that terrible day of 9/11/2001.

The completed Twin Towers of World Trade Center viewed from the Hudson River. July 1974.

08/18/2026

Nine years of travel through deep space and nearly 3 billion miles led to this incredible view of Pluto. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft launched in 2006 and finally flew past the distant world in July 2015, giving humanity its first detailed look at a place that had remained mysterious for generations.

What it discovered was far more complex than many expected. Pluto has enormous mountains made primarily of water ice, vast frozen plains, glaciers and surprisingly diverse terrain. Some of these icy peaks rise several kilometers above the surface.

At Pluto’s extremely cold temperatures, water ice becomes so rigid that it behaves more like rock, allowing entire mountain ranges to form from it. Meanwhile, softer frozen materials such as nitrogen can slowly flow across parts of the surface like glaciers.

For most of human history, Pluto was nothing more than a tiny point of light in the sky. Then one spacecraft traveled for almost a decade to show us that even at the edge of our planetary neighborhood, there are entire landscapes waiting to be discovered.

08/18/2026

In 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless II made history by becoming the first human to float freely in space without a tether.

Using a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) — a jet-powered backpack that fired bursts of nitrogen gas — McCandless drifted nearly 100 meters away from the Space Shuttle, farther than any human had ever gone without being physically connected to a spacecraft.

This historic moment happened during Space Shuttle mission STS-41B, alongside fellow astronaut Robert Stewart, marking the world’s first untethered spacewalk.

The MMU, although heavy on Earth, became weightless in orbit — allowing astronauts to fly freely like satellites in human form.

It was later replaced by the SAFER safety propulsion unit used today.

This image captures one of the most iconic moments in human space exploration —
a human, alone, floating between Earth and the stars. 🌍✨

📸 Image Credit: NASA — Mission STS-41B

04/20/2026